GVS: Oliver was a big supporter of my work, and I think that what was going on was that Oliver was looking at me as a compatriot, someone he respected as a director, whereas at Warner Bros, the executives and the producers, were looking at my demographic. I'd made Drugstore Cowboy, which made $5 million, and My Own Private Idaho, which made $15 million, which was pretty good, but I was a low-budget filmmaker. I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.

DLB: Well, the meals are better!

GVS: Yeah! But making a $3 million film is a different business. So I lasted about one draft. I didn't really have the support, not for any real reason, but my ideas were like, "This doesn't look like a gay movie because they don't look gay, they don't kiss, nothing happens to signify that they are gay." And I was met with, "You don't understand why this is an important thing." They just wanted me to do Oliver's script, which was really asking the question: why did Dan White shoot these guys? That was really the theme. Harvey was the guy he shot, and he happened to be from the Castro, but Harvey wasn't the central character - it was about the overall begging question, which is a big begging question. So that's where I was.

Are the studio - and the public - more ready for a film like this now, with its more emotional approach?

GVS: Yeah I think there's a lot of that. The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay. I think Ellen helped changed that.

DLB: I think society has opened, but we're now in a post-Aids, gay rights era. We're talking about rights again instead of survival. And so that's starting to sound more like Harvey's era. So it feels like it's a part of the dialog of today. And in that way I think the public is ready to discuss this again.

How did you feel about the parallels between Prop 8 last November and 1978's Prop 6?

GVS: There was no indication that was going to happen, at least not while we were shooting. And also, Barack Obama wasn't the candidate, and Sarah Palin didn't exist. All this stuff happened during our editing period: the world began to resemble some things in our movie. Obama, because he used the word "hope" so much, started to resemble Harvey and especially his hope speech. And Sarah Palin because she just looked like Anita Bryant.

DLB: And sounded like her! But there were clues when I started writing. Because it was 2004, so you had the re-election campaign of George W Bush and the Karl Rove strategy with the language of it sounding so much like Anita Bryant and the "save our children" campaign, bolstering their base through fuelling this fight between evangelicals and the gay community. We started hearing the same lines that I was looking at in my research!

You're working together on a film of Tom Wolf's 1968 book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This subject is also getting the doc approach, and I know you've been in contact with Alex Gibney about his project.

GVS: He's a lot further ahead with his film than we are. He's incredible, and his filmmaking's incredible. But Lance is writing our script, and I haven't seen it.

DLB: Yeah, I've got to go now - I've got to get back to work! I have a draft, I just haven't had a chance to work on it in like two weeks.

Have you taken the same approach as with Milk, interviewing the real people?

DLB: Yeah. You have to kind of act like there's not a book, at least for a bit, and just discover the story yourself. But the book is wonderful, a great thing to guide you. When we finally get done with these press interviews for Milk, hopefully I can find two hours to read it head-to-toe with no break - to read it like it's the movie. It's that far along, but then we'll see what Gus says.